Baikonur 2.0: ‘inland-offshore’ space economies in post-Soviet Kazakhstan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The global space industry brings to mind the horizons of science and technology, large rockets, and heroic astronauts. The land and infrastructure used to launch things into the cosmos, however, is far less seen. Since the mid-1950s, large territories or ‘fall zones’ in the Kazakh steppe have been used for jettisoning stages of inter-continental ballistic missiles and other kinds of carrier rockets from the Soviet launch complex, in the south west of the country, known as the Baikonur Cosmodrome. In this article, I explore how land leases and use agreements between the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan after the fall of the Soviet Union have upcycled this Soviet era site into a private enclave for the accumulation of capital and waste of a now global space industry. As during the Cold War, launches from Baikonur depend upon thousands of miles of downrange land in Kazakhstan to be catchment areas for toxic fuel and rocket debris that falls from the sky during each and every launch. Here, I introduce the concept of an ‘inland-offshore’, to explain how post-Soviet land and infrastructure lease agreements have created offshore-like political and economic privileges and extraterritorial landscapes of proprietary governance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".